Category: Intellectual Property

Since writing my latest book, ‘A Confession,’ I’ve gone through a series of back-and-forth conversations with myself about how to share this new work with the world. I’ve self-published before (twice) so I know that world pretty well. It’s filled with freedom and creative control and it’s a great solution for anyone who wants to get their work out there. It also hasn’t worked all that well for me. Part of that reason could very well be the quality of my previous work. I’ll be honest – some of it’s…

If you’ve been reading here lately, you’ll know that I’ve been doing some A/B/n tests to determine if it is possible to affect conversion rate of customers looking for free content by introducing “ethics-based” messaging into the page. As I reported previously, it definitely appears to work – at least in the tests I’ve done so far – but upon further research additional knowledge is starting to surface.

Some time back, we identified an issue where customers were hitting product pages for our digital media content, but then abandoning the site immediately after. After seeing this, we dug in a bit further and saw that the majority of this was from customers coming directly to the site via Google or other search engines. The best way to get to the bottom of this behavior, we decided, was to put together a survey and ask customers why they were leaving. After gathering quite a bit of feedback, the reason…

My book, ‘Starving the Artist: How the Internet Culture of “Free” Threatens to Exterminate the Creative Class and What Can Be Done to Save It’ is, from this point forward, free FOREVER as a PDF download. Yes, it sounds ironic – but if you read the book you’ll understand the point here. I wrote Starving the Artist. It is mine. I alone have the right to determine how much it should cost. And now, with all the back-and-forth over property rights, I’ve decided it’s more important for people to read…

If you’ve been paying much attention to any of the tech news lately, you’re aware of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that’s currently being debated at the Federal level. You’re probably also aware of the fact that many sites, including Wikipedia, Google, Scribd and others are protesting the legislation – some going as far as to black out their entire sites today to bring attention to the issue. I’ve read SOPA, and agree that there are some areas where it definitely needs work (in particular the forced removal or…

Great article here from the Guardian about an artist who has been fighting with Grooveshark to get them to finally stop giving her music away for free (without her permission) – once and for all. Spoiler alert: It doesn’t go so well for the musician. It started when I tried searching for songs I’ve cowritten. Amazingly, I found almost every song I’ve ever released – even songs in Swedish. Now, to clarify, Grooveshark does not have a licence to feature any of these songs, and they don’t pay me anything….

Had they bothered to read my book, Starving the Artist, this wouldn’t have really been all that shocking. I have an entire section on Grooveshark – including public tweets they sent out to me that basically said the exact same thing years ago. Judging from internal emails, Grooveshark opted for forgiveness. In a April 27, 2010 email to Sina Simantob, a Escape Media Group director, Andrew B. Lipsher, then a partner at private equity firm Greycroft Partners, explained that he understands "the ask forgiveness and not permission strategy. It is…

“Look, piracy is outright theft. People are out there blatantly stealing from Americans — stealing their ideas and robbing us of America’s creative energies. There’s no reason why we should treat intellectual property any different than tangible property.” via Vice President Joe Biden Calls Piracy ‘Outright Theft’ | Billboard.biz.